Yet another pet peeve

I had to pull this peeve out of a recent comment, because it’s one I couldn’t agree with more.

Establishments that serve salads with large chunks of vegetables. If I wanted to cut up my own vegetables I would have stayed home and made my own supper.

Amen, sister. A long time ago I worked for a head chef who would — when looking over food that was supposed to be bite-size, especially salad — grab an overly large chunk of something and force the cook responsible for it to eat the offending item. He’d take a full flap of lettuce, or a golfballish piece of potato, or a stalk of broccoli as big as an antler, shove it into the cook’s mouth and, yelling, would ask if the cook could, or would want to, eat such a large thing. Invariably the offender would say no, and the heaf chef would ask why they were requiring paying customers to do just that.

This came up as a training/punishment technique in one of author Michael Ruhlman’s books, when he asked French Laundry/Per Se chef-owner Thomas Keller why he bothered taking the time to slice off filmy silverskin from duck breast. Rather than answer him, Keller cut off some, handed it to Ruhlman and demanded he eat it. Keller then asked, “Did you like that?” Ruhlman said no, it was disagreeable if not disgusting. Keller said, “That’s why.”

I’ve chopped plenty of salad in my day, including case upon case of iceberg lettuce (it was a long time ago). When I think now about the wedges people must have had to dismantle at the table because a young me was chopping carelessly, I’m ashamed. But that doesn’t stop me, on occasion, from wanting to march into a restaurant kitchen with a huge piece of what ought to be bite-size food and demand, “There are a lot of knives in here. How hard would it have been to cut this?”